Activist’s book shows racism still prevalent in Canada in many ways

Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present Robyn Maynard Fernwood Publishing White, middle-class Canadians like to think our country is a bastion of anti-racism, citing the escaped slaves from the U.S. who found refuge here during the era of the Underground Railway and some progressive government policies.

Activist and researcher Robyn Maynard argues in her compelling new book Policing Black Lives that we should re-examine our complacency.

Canadian residents of African heritage, like Indigenous people and other visible minorities, continue to suffer from discrimination in law enforcement, education, the social welfare system and the wage economy. If you are a person of colour in Vancouver, you are far more likely to be stopped and questioned in the street by police than your fellow citizens who look “white.” This grim reality is often referred to as “the crime of walking while black.”

Recently, a Freedom of Information application has produced shocking figures from Vancouver Police Department records. (Disclosure: I am a member of the board of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, which helped publicize these numbers.)

People of African descent make up only one per cent of Vancouver’s population, but four per cent of reported “street checks.”

Indigenous people make up two per cent of the city’s population, but 15 per cent of those who are stopped and questioned.

The numbers are even more striking for Indigenous women, who are two per cent of the female population but 21 per cent of women street-checked.

Black Canadians, Maynard tells us, are more likely to be arrested, more likely to be detained pretrial, to have restrictive bail conditions imposed and to have harsher sentences than white Canadians. Too often, encounters between armed police and people of colour end in civilian deaths.

While some argue racial differences in arrests and convictions reflect more crimes committed by people of colour, Maynard argues it is far more likely the over-representation of people of colour in Canadian courts and prisons is a result of enforcement and investigation, as evidenced by the Vancouver street check numbers and similar numbers in other Canadian cities.

She wryly notes a 2016 CBC report that Revenue Canada secretly offered 26 millionaires amnesty for their involvement in a lucrative illegal tax scam. The poor, the non-white and the marginalized are seldom offered such official mercy.

A racism-free Canada? As this searing book illustrates, we are not there yet.

Hopefully, Maynard’s readers will be inspired to redouble our efforts to get there.